Heartlessness

Greetings again.  I really thought I'd let the last few posts sit a bit, but in reading the news (yesterday now) I knew I just had to post something about the heartbreak so many immigrants are undergoing. And it's not just here in the U. S., but in other places around the world as well.

I just can not fathom how these people can live with themselves while treating other human beings so cruelly.  I suppose the Milgram Experiment  and the Stanford Prison Experiment explain some of it.

You can read about the "Dreamer" so recently taken into custody by ICE after speaking out.  She's not even the first case that is outrageous, not even the first Dreamer case.  This story details the case of an undocumented women detained after seeking a protection order against an abuser, along with mentions of some other cases. There are some who see the damage these heavy-handed crackdowns are having on the targets and their families.  WHY DON'T MORE OF US?

Since Brexit, there have been many stories of folks having problems staying in the U. K. or being deported.  Here is a very striking example.  This woman is even in a better position than most who find themselves with similar problems, believe it or not.  In the op-ed, Irene Clennell tells her story of being forced to leave her family.  "I’d been in the UK since 1988, married to a British man for 27 years. Yet I was forced from my family, without legal advice, and left in Singapore with just £12."  Further, she adds:  "The authorities have shown their willingness to treat foreign-born people as second-class citizens, no matter how integrated we are – and, worse, treat us like criminals... During my removal from Britain I was treated like a terrorist: I was restrained by the arms, my every word written down, and there were guards on the door when I went to the toilet."

But there is more outrage to come.  I think taking today's low-down prize in heartlessness is the mayor (she has so dishonored the title that NO, I won't capitalize it) of Calais, France.  She is determined to put an end to folks feeding the immigrants that are coming to the area and struggling to survive.  This, the article points out, will particularly hurt young people.  How heartless are you when your lack concern for fellow human beings going hungry is such that you don't even want anyone else to feed them out of concern for their plight?  What kind of heart, what kind of mindset is that?

This really is a challenge for all of us.  Shades of "I was only following orders," one has to wonder about how folks could be so unfeeling (maybe there was something to those experiments after all...). This fine "Views" article from commmondreams challenges all of us.  What would we do?  And this one, also pointed out something I certainly was not aware of;  Nazi death camps were right in urban areas!  Joe Engel, a Holocaust survivor on the tour which gave rise to the article, said: “People say they didn’t know. All the camps were so close to the city. How could they not know? You could smell the ashes, the flesh.”  In his conclusion, the author of the piece also challenges us: "What kind of witnesses shall we be?"  Indeed, each in our own way, WE MUST NOT LOOK AWAY.

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